On Kindles and Olives

Cover via Amazon

When I first started out on this whole book writing thing, to my ever-lasting regret, I kept very quiet indeed about what I was up to. It was to take five years before I told anyone I knew that I had written a book, let alone that I was submitting it to agents in the hope of finding a publisher.

Why? Simply because I have always loathed people who announce they're writing a book. If it ain't in print, it ain't worth a damn, was the way I thought at the time.

Although I had shared the MS of Space with a couple of close friends by the time I found authonomy, I had stuck to my guns. When I finally let the cat out of the bag, I was shocked by people's kindness and supportive response.

Not as shocked as I was by the goodwill and support from everyone around me yesterday. The day started on a high when I heard from the National Media Council that I have the go-ahead to print Olives in the UAE. The team at the NMC have been wonderful - quite the opposite of my experiences of their predecessor, the wittily named Ministry of Information.To come out of that process having won fans for the book was a complete and welcome surprise.

This means I can provide a Middle East edition of the book for all those here who can't easily get on Amazon (because Amazon doesn't support the Middle East). I have distribution sorted out for the UAE, Jordan and Lebanon. All I need do now is finish my quest for a printing press that has stocks of the right grade of paper (booky books are printed on a particular type of lightweight but bulky paper) and I'm on track to be in the shops for the beginning of December. My first job this morning is to go to the NMC building in Qusais and get me an ISBN number for the UAE edition.

But yesterday really hit its stride when I tweeted the link to the Kindle Edition of Olives. My heartfelt thanks to everyone for the messages, congrats and the like. Putting the book on Kindle was the first thing I did when I made the decision to self publish - there's a natty piece of freeware called MobiPocket Creator, which I've posted about before, that renders the process pretty simple. You then sign into Amazon as an author and select your preferred distribution channels and then it's pretty much hey presto!

Get the Kindle Edition of Olives (UK)

Get the Kindle Edition of Olives (US)

Now all I need to do is sign off my CreateSpace proof (winging its way to me thanks to Aramex' natty Shop and Ship service) to get the print edition up on Amazon and pack the UAE edition off to the printers.

I cannot begin to tell you how liberating it feels to finally get my work out there. I can't say I regret not doing it sooner, because I think we all have to take our own paths to things. But I'm very glad I've done it now.

Olives – A Violent Romance

This is the cover art for Olives - A Violent Romance, my first published novel. It's quite a high-res file so you can click on it and get it nice and big if you like. It’s by Naeema Zarif, a lady whose work has long enthralled me. Naeema is responsible for the iconography of GeekFest, her work on the various GeekFest posters increasingly taking on the style of her own art – a distinctive series of images consisting of a range of juxtaposed elements creating a whole that makes your eyes flit around trying to decipher what’s going on in the resulting melange. There’s often a great deal of wit, subtlety and game-playing, but Naeema is a natural tease and likes to leave the viewer to try and sort it all out rather than giving the game away.

My own cover for Olives, designed back when I needed one to post an early version of the manuscript up on Harper Collins’ Authonomy, consisted of a photo of some olives together with the word (wait for it) 'Olives' in my favourite typeface of all time, Gill Perpetua. I have long admired stonecutter and typographer Eric Gill, who combined being a darling of the Catholic church with a singularly robust sex life involving most of the women who ever met him.

Naeema’s art for Olives, when it arrived, blew me away. It’s utterly not what I expected, and yet seems so, well ‘right.’ It also, critically, works well as a thumbnail – today’s book cover needs to work as a booky book cover, a Kindle book cover (in colour as well as mono, BTW - don't forget the Kindle Fire!) and also as a thumbnail for Amazon.com and other sites.

It’s no surprise the cover of Olives consists of a number of elements. It’s a mash of images that come from Naeema’s reading of the book, there are elements resonant of multi-theism – Amman’s citadel is in there (look for a shape a little like ‘in’ at an angle across the cover), there is the earth the olives come from, the land and its importance are such an important part of Olives. The blues of the Mediterranean sky and the water are there, too. And so is parchment, a symbol of the unravelling peace the book is wound around. You’ll be hard put to find ‘em, but there are even some olives in there. Together, these things all speak to Olives – to the fundamentals that underpin the book. And behind the title, in faded characters, Mahmoud Darwish’s famous words – which form the frontispiece to Olives: “If the Olive Trees knew the hands that planted them, Their Oil would become Tears.”

It’s a remarkable piece of art and I’m very proud to have it grace and represent my work

Being able to select who designs my cover is, of course, a huge privilege open pretty much only to self published writers - publishing companies don't consult authors about their covers, that's a marketing decision and one not to be made by a mere scribbler (or 'content producer'). I suppose you get an option once you sell your first million copies or so, but I know a number of published authors who were told, 'This is your book's cover, matey', which was the beginning and end of the conversation. I'd always hoped if I landed a contract they'd let me at least pitch Naeema's hat into the ring, but I sort of knew that was a forlorn hope. But now I'm in control, I get to have my cake and eat it.

And it tastes just dandy...

Ebooks Outsell Booky Books. So What?

Image by englishpen via FlickrWith the news that ebooks have now outsold booky books, we can perhaps now recognise the tipping point has been reached.

One fascinating report I’ve seen of this year’s London Book Fair neatly paints a picture of an industry reeling as it comes to terms with the ferocity of the changes taking place around it. More and more writers are taking to putting their works up on the Kindle store and other self publishing platforms rather than go through the relentless round of submissions and rejections that getting published entails.

HarperCollins CEO Brian Murray, speaking at the LBF, called this time 'a watershed'. Murray was noting that sales of a number of HC's front list titles were running at over 50% on ebook formats - he also noted that the growth in e-readers (to 40 million) was having a disproportionate effect on the market because e-readers had reached 'core' readers, people who buy over twelve books a year.

There are reports of Amazon employing editors and seeking an editorial director. This is interesting precisely because if Amazon decided to have its own imprint, it could pick from the many new titles being uploaded to the Kindle e-book store and take the best of them and place them under its powerful marketing wing – with editors guaranteeing the quality of books under that imprint.

That would address one major complaint of the post-ebook era - the lack of qualitative guarantees where so many authors now have direct access to the market without the checks and balances of editors and the like.Yes, this gives a more egalitarian market with greater choice for readers (and less Katie Price schlock being pushed in our faces), but it also atomises the market (there is such a thing as overwhelming choice) and makes it potentially hard for readers to work out when a book is total rubbish. I have to confess, of my current crop of 34 Kindle books, one non-fiction title turned out to be a rip-off project.

But with editorial input, an imprint, Amazon could possibly create something a little like Authonomy done right. Everyone’s uploading their books, the best of those books are plucked out and given a sheen by Amazon, which could sell books under its imprint at a premium (because you know they’re good) and effectively become its own publishing house. Now a publishing house that owns the majority of the distribution medium becomes interesting. It would be like one publisher owning every high street bookstore (remember them?).

It’s also potentially massively anti-competitive, but that’s another kettle of frogs.

What’s Cornish For Fatwa?

Today's post is a guest post by author pal Simon Forward, one of the little band of writers I've kept in touch with since Authonomy - and the only one I've managed to meet face to face, Simon is a naturally funny bloke who brings his humour very much to bear in his writing - his mad sci-fi fantasy Evil UnLtd was the first book to get him up to the giddy heights of the Authonomy Editor's Desk and he went on to repeat the feat with kids' book Kip Doodle And The Armchair Of Lost Dreams. To date he's the only author to have been twice authonomised, although I'm told the swelling went down soon after.

If you have a Kindle (or the Kindle PC reader, which is surprisingly usable, BTW), you can buy your very own copy of what is now to be known as 'The Controversial' Evil UnLtd for £1.99 from Amazon UK by clicking here or for $3.19 from Amazon.com by clicking here or Smashwords by clicking here.

Hang on! Controversial? Yes, read on...




I’m writing to you from a dingy attic room in a secret location, somewhere in the South West of England. I’ve stocked up on canned foods, bottled water, all the basic essentials, because I expect to be here for some time.

Ordinarily I like to write in a nice open public space, especially my favourite local café, but I fear I can no longer safely venture out as I have been targeted by extremists.

It’s not something you expect to happen here in this fairly sedentary part of the world. There are such things as Cornish Nationalists, but nobody can take a separatist movement seriously when our key industries – tourism and fishing (and, once upon a time, mining) – are all in decline (or consigned to history books and sighing recollections). But never underestimate your ability to inadvertently upset some fundamentalist wherever you live in this 21st century world of ours. That would appear to be the lesson I should have learned.

What did I do to incur this wrath? Well, I wrote a book. And now I am the Salman Rushdie of the South West.

It’s a comedy, in which villains are the heroes, entitled Evil UnLtd (Vol I: The Root Of all Evil). It is, I suppose it’s fair to say, in a similar vein to the late great Douglas Adams’ The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy. On the front cover, it bears the tag line, The Farce Of The Dark Side.

I should have foreseen the consequences.

At a recent book-signing for the paperback edition, one gentleman asked me if it was “a proper fiction book, or an actual philosophy of Evil”. I didn’t even know there was such a thing – although part of me felt like I ought to write one. Similarly a woman in my local cafe expressed an aversion to the whole notion of a book about bad guys. These were only the warning signs and I foolishly disregarded them as just amusing anecdote material.

Since then, however, matters have escalated to a far more serious level. Certainly the situation is no longer a laughing matter.

It began with a threatening email. In the most abusive language imaginable, it told me to vacate my home county of Cornwall. The email seemed to me to be typed in the semi-illiterate fashion of one of those people versed in little more than txt-spk.

Those of a squeamish nature look away now:

you fuck shit: i'm on to you: get out of cornwall and your budis: or feel the pain:--
GODOFG00D

Simon Forward in hiding in a remote Cornish location 

wearing a disguise mustardy shirt so nobody'll spot 'im.

I was concerned and shaken by the harshness of the message, hurled at me out of the blue by some random stranger. But ultimately, with no other explanation offering itself, I concluded that it must be some bizarre form of spam that had slipped through the standard filters, with the specific reference to Cornwall being simply an odd coincidence. Surely it couldn’t actually have been directed at me personally, I naively thought.

It was followed by a second but frankly unintelligible email, including one of those links you know never to click on, which served to confirm the spam theory in my mind.

At around the same time, on a visit to my café for another session of cappuccino-fuelled creativity, I noticed – with some dismay – that my stack of business cards, which my friend, the manageress, had kindly allowed me to display on the counter, had been mysteriously depleted. No member of staff had been responsible – they all like me – but someone had evidently taken it upon themselves to remove the cards and destroy or otherwise dispose of them.

Having decided not to let it bother me, the email was already behind me at this point and far from my thoughts, so I never connected the two incidents.

Until last Saturday, when I received a phone call on my mobile. I failed to answer the ring quite in time, but although it was an unknown number I rang the caller back.

The fellow who picked up sounded awkward, as though as though having something difficult to say but not quite sure if he had his speech prepared. Eventually, he proceeded to explain that the reason he had called was to apologise, because he had thought I was “actually promoting evil.” But he had since determined that I had in fact only been promoting a book.

Horrifying realisation dawned and I said, “So you were the one who sent me that abusive email.”

He confessed. And I also knew in that instant that he had been the one to attack that display of business cards, since they carry information on both my email address and my mobile phone number. About a hundred other questions and/or remarks struggled to emerge from me at that point, but I ultimately settled for shaking my head in disbelief. A gesture that perhaps doesn’t communicate itself too well over the phone, but maybe some hint of it crept into my tone. In any case, the culprit reiterated his apology and stated that, obviously, he wasn’t the sort to stand for genuinely bad people but he now realised his mistake. He went on to say that he might check out a sample of my book online.

Feeling that most of the comments I wanted to make at that point would only have exacerbated matters, I decided to end the call with a simple thank you for his apology.

Several thoughts occurred to me in the silence after hanging up.

First, that those business cards also bore the tag line, The Farce Of The Dark Side, in a larger font than any of the contact information. There were clear references to the fact that I was an author and that Evil UnLtd was a “New Series from Galaxy 6 Broadcasting, available on Kindle from Amazon and other ebook formats from www.smashwords.com.” On the reverse of the card, there’s also a line-up of (computer-generated) comic mug-shots of the (entirely fictional) characters who feature in the series. Most prominent is the logo, a sort of business plaque, incorporating a cartoony performance graph with a broken devil’s fork.

It beggared belief that any thinking human being could interpret that as the promotional material of an actual evil organisation, but even if that was their first impression, I had to wonder why they wouldn’t simply investigate the listed links to, I don’t know, check their facts before launching into their campaign of protest.

Second, they might have paused to consider that actual evil organisations don’t tend to proclaim themselves as evil. More often than not, in fact, they tend to claim to have God or good on their side, while perhaps criminal organisations might admit to a measure of self-interest. Rarely, if ever, in the real world, do they own up to evil, let alone include it in their official logo.

Clearly now, the individual has apologised and I should be free to feel safe once more. But naturally enough I’m now concerned that there are others out there who may object to my bringing Evil with a capital E (aka laughter) into the world and – even in this ostensibly idyllic setting of Cornwall – find more aggressive ways to express their righteous anger. I used to enjoy the fact that ours was such a relatively small community where so many people knew everyone. Now, I worry that this could work very much against me as I struggle to promote my humble humorous offerings. Am I about to have a Cornish fatwa on my head? Imprisoned in my own home, fearful of venturing out, will add further challenges to the already-difficult task of book-promotion.

Of course, I should feel grateful that there are people out there willing to fight evil in the world, without regard for their own safety or indeed the facts, but I would much prefer if they would at least look past a book title before embarking on their crusade. To the best of my knowledge, Douglas Adams based his most famous work on his experiences hitch-hiking around Europe and not around the likes of Betelgeuse as the title originally implied.

Failing that, if these people are going to burn my books, I can only hope that they will please buy a copy for the purpose. Despite the name, the Kindle version is not ideal for this and I do recommend the very reasonably priced paperback.

And if my life is in danger, well, I do have one idea to cheat the nutters of their goal. As an absolute last resort, I can always die laughing before they get to me...

Do More Evil

 The Man in the Mustardy Shirt

I consider myself extraordinarily lucky to have a large number of talented friends dotted all over the world. Some are online pals, others are ‘real world’ friends – and some are people I met online and subsequently have hooked up with' in analogue'.

One such person is my old authonomy buddy, Simon Forward. We joined each other in the race for the authonomy ‘Editor’s Desk’ and both got there, gleefully and manically mucking about in the forums as we plugged our respective works, promoting them to creaking point but also having a great deal of fun in the process. We became something of a double act: Simon’s schoolboy humour and my suave, sophisticated charm worked together like a dream.

Not content with bobbing around at the top of the foetid pool of festering books that is authonomy, Simon then tossed a second book into the ring, a kids’ yarn focused around hero Kip Doodle. And, damn me, but he did it again and so became the only writer to get to the top at authonomy twice. Not, you understand, that it did him the blindest bit of good...

Simon has, in fact, written several highly successful published novels, although sadly on other people’s behalf – he’s one of the writers of the massively popular Dr. Who books, for instance. This resulted in The Niece From Hell (who is Dr Who bonkers) getting a signed Dr Who book to add to her signed Caroline Lawrence ‘Roman Mystery’. Caroline, a highly astute million-selling kids’ author who knows a niece with a minted uncle when she sees one, seeded TNFH’s massive and ever-growing collection of Caroline Lawrence books by whipping one out and signing it for me when we met at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature. But getting a signed Dr Who book awed the child into a rare (and prolonged) silence. For this alone, I owe Simon a great debt.

It is with great pleasure, therefore, that I can now report that The Man In The Mustardy Shirt has only been and gone and gone ‘e’. He's taken the plunge and released his hilarious sci-fi comedy, Evil UnLtd, on Amazon’s Kindle, which means you can get your hands on the book for a mere $2.99 and, what’s more, you can have it in your eager paws in seconds flat.

What better way to celebrate than talking to him about the project? Here’s the View From Forward.

Evil UnLtd is clearly something of a pangalactic caper - was this an escape from writing Dr Who books for you?
Pangalactic is the telltale word there, I think. As in gargleblaster.  The Hitch-Hikers influence is strong in this one, Obi-Wan, but it's fair to say that, rather than an escape from, this is an extension of my Doctor Who writing. Basically name a TV sci-fi series and it was an inspiration of one sort or another. Even the sci-fi series' I loathed played their part - if, for example, they were bland or boring, I thought how much more interesting even the same storylines would be if you replaced the wet goody-two-shoes hero types with a band of villains.

On a very basic level, saving the universe/world/space-whale then becomes a different ball game. Even if it's just saving the universe/world/space-whale for themselves. Then when it comes to the details, well, everything just spirals in all sorts of directions, which is just great from a creative point of view.

How would you describe the plot, briefly?
It's a very organic affair, kicking off with a sort of Reservoir Dogs bank-robbery goes wrong scenario, with a gradually unfolding mystery that culminates in what I hope is one of the bizarrest action-packed sf climaxes  you'll have ever read - until I can come up with a better one for Evil 2.

Do you not think we already see enough commercialisation of Evil without contemplating a future of evil commerce?
We see way too much commercialisation of Evil, yes. Which is why the world needs a brand of Evil we can actually laugh at.

Who's your favourite character in the book and why?
That would have to be Dexter Snide. I have a soft spot for all of them - and no it's not just the marsh world of Delta Magna - but there's something wonderfully odious about Dexter. He's essentially like the Master, I suppose, a sort of Moriarty figure - which means I should give him a thinly veiled Time Lord opponent at some point I guess - but he's also the pure unadulterated evil in me. That is, I'd never do or say the things he does, you understand, but I do love writing him.

I also love the Hatchling, as he's the most enigmatic of the bunch - spending so much time in his egg as he does - and the rare point-of-view scenes I do for him are a treat.

What's your proudest 'funny moment'?
That would have to be the climax. At the time, I didn't quite know how the whole thing was going to wrap up, and it just came to me in a flash. One of those things that just grows organically out of the plot and as I was writing it, everything just clicked. Although that may have been the RSI.

Did you ever sit back and think, 'Crumbs, this is just too silly!'?
Not really. I mean, there were times I had my doubts whether it would appeal to anyone else, but the curious thing about SF comedy, I find, is that the characters and the universe you're creating have to take themselves seriously. So it's as immersive in its own way as crafting a straight-faced sci-fi epic - for which, by the way, I have the greatest respect, and I think you have to love your 'proper' sci-fi in any case in order to write a full novel of the slightly dafter variety. There were probably a few bits and pieces I chucked out as too silly or not working, but if something is daft and makes you laugh, you just construct a rationale for it within the context of your universe and voila! suddenly it's part of that universe and as a bonus you've (hopefully) written an entertaining discourse on the ins and outs of a society of leaf-like aliens who eat music. (I haven't, you understand, it's just an off the top of my head example.)

Why did you decide to go down the Kindle road? Did you evaluate various 'e-publishing' options, or just go straight for the 'Big K'?
I'm afraid to say, I didn't really investigate alternatives and plumped straight for the Special K. Possibly out of a desire to fit into that slimline red dress, who knows. But more probably because, while I was resistant to the e-publishing route for a long while, one particular friend and my mum-in-law kept urging me to publish something of mine on Kindle. They happened to specify Kindle and so when I finally buckled under the persuasion, I opted for that route. When I think about it now, there's part of me that associates the Amazon brand with a degree of trust that perhaps wouldn't be felt with other options, so I'm hoping that people will see the book on the Amazon site and that might help persuade them to give it a whirl.

What's your hope for the project? 100 copies sold? International fame? Just get it out of your system?
Here I have to separate hopes and realistic aims. Hopes are to attract the attentions of a publisher or Joss Whedon. (Evil is already - for plot reasons - kind of a TV series in book form and Joss, for my money, is the man to head the screen version.)  But this is an experiment and there's a sales figure I'd consider a success, although I'm not sure what that is at this stage. I don't know enough about the general volumes of sales of Kindle e-books, although I gather recently they outstripped Amazon hardback sales for the first time.
If every one of my Facebook and Twitter and authonomy contacts bought a copy, that'd be a few hundred sales right there, and more if they spread the word and so on, but you know how it is, you invite twenty people to the party and only eight can make it.

How would you define success? If you reach that, would you take other projects online?
Real success would be, like I say, attracting the attention of a publisher. When (a sample of) Evil was on authonomy, it proved its appeal to a wide range of readers - not just sf-heads - but there was a forum in which people could be enticed to give a book a chance, even if it was outside their normal comfort zone, because you'd been helpful or entertaining or just plain daft in the online discussions.

Without that - and without the kind of budget a mainstream publisher can command - it's going to be a huge challenge to attract the readers and convince them to give Evil a chance. So I'll be tweeting, facebooking, blogging and quite possibly even putting together a book trailer and seeing how it goes. That said, if I do feel this one meets with a measure of success, I will be putting other projects online. At the very least, I'll be uploading Evil 2 and future Evil volumes, maybe make that an annual event. Because a) establishing a series might prompt more interest and b) I enjoy writing these characters and, damn it, some of my work needs to be out there, being read, by some of the people at the very least.

Why Evil as your first Kindle book? Wouldn't KipDoodle find a more ready 'e-reader friendly' audience?
I considered making Kip Doodle available - that one was even more popular on authonomy - but as much as adults do enjoy it, I didn't think it would reach many of its target audience - ie. kids - on Kindle. I may be wrong, but I didn't imagine a lot of kids reading e-books. Although a friend of mine pointed out there were something like 15,000 kids' books available on Kindle already. Whereas I figured there might be some crossover between, say, sci-fi geeks and the sort of technophiles who'd either have a Kindle or be into downloading the software to their PC/Mac/iPhone/whatever.

What has been YOUR favourite Kindle buy so far? Is there anything you wouldn't read on a Kindle?
It's early days for me as a consumer. I have my eye on a few titles, and if nothing else the novelty value has re-awakened my previously flagging enthusiasm for reading. But so far I've focused on some of the classics that I've overlooked - not least because they're free, or close to it. Most significant has been Jules Verne's Mysterious Island, which I enjoyed, not necessarily because it's his best, but because I've found it surprisingly ripe for comedy.

More inspiration like that can only lead to more Evil and is therefore very welcome.

BUY EVIL!

I'm sad to say that Amazon does NOT support the Middle East on Kindle and won't allow downloads unless you have a valid address in the UK, US or elsewhere in the world you can give 'em. This sucks royally, BTW.

However, if you have a Kindle (or the Kindle PC reader, which is surprisingly usable, BTW) and you can download books, you can buy your very own copy of Evil UnLtd for $2.99 from Amazon UK by clicking here or Amazon.com by clicking here. 

Ha. I want to see the silly bugger sign this one.

Wedding Night

Sabina England, or Deaf Brown Trash Punk as some will know her, is a colourful character at the best of times. I first met her on authonomy where her entrance, characteristically led by a greeting laced with the 'C' word, caused outrage amongst the serried ranks of tank-top wearing literary aspirants. Her book, 'Brown Trash' was a stunning read - fresh, challenging and with so much voice you'd want to cover your ears to block out its strident call. If you did, you'd get a taste of Sabina World, because she is (as you may have worked out from the above sobriquet) profoundly deaf.

Sabina's silent movies have been popping up on YouTube for a while now and have earned her a growing following. Her stageplays, never less than provocative, have been produced both in the US and UK and now she's gone and written, direct and produced a bigger budget film, 'The Wedding Night' - a much slicker piece that has so far been funded by donations raised by supporters. She's not quite there yet, the film's in the can (well, on the hard disk) but she needs more money to pay for the final edit. Take a look at the trailer:

 

I wanted to bring Sabina onto the radio show I co-host with Jessica Swann every Tuesday on Dubai Eye Radio, Dubai Today, but there's a slight glitch - being deaf is a slight impediment to doing phone interviews on the radio. So we did it by text instead:

What inspired the idea of ‘The Wedding Night’?
I was inspired to write "Wedding Night," which was originally a stage play. It is a very minimalist piece with just 2 actors in a hotel room. And I thought to myself, I can turn this into a film with a very low budget. It is heavy on drama, but very light on the budget. I wrote "Wedding Night" because it is a feminist response to the hypocrisy of sex and women's bodies in Indian-Pakistani culture and amongst Muslims. It is widely accepted for males to have had sexual experience and to have many female partners, yet if a woman dares to explore her sexuality and have sex with just 1 man, she is shunned and shamed by society. Also, I was inspired and disgusted by countless real-life stories I have heard about forced arranged marriages and the tragic consequences that come out of it.

Who are the actors? Are they trained?
The actors are Alpa Banker (actress) and Sanjiv Bajaj (actor). Alpa is a professional actress who lives in Los Angeles. She does theatre, commercials, modeling, and film. Sanjiv Bajaj is a doctor who graduated from Princeton University and founded an independent South Asian theatre company. They were both amazing in their roles.

What was the greatest challenge in conceiving, filming and directing this?
The greatest challenge to make the film happen was getting started in the first place. I didn't know who I was going to hire to shoot the film. I didn't have any money. I didn't have a goddamned clue how to go make this happen. But after consulting many Facebook friends who have worked in the film industry, I got some very good ideas and began raising funds through IndieGoGo. I also posted ads online seeking crew and actors. And soon, all these people were coming up to me and they wanted to work with me.

What’s your hope for it?
I don't have any hope for "Wedding Night." I just made the film because I've always wanted to be a filmmaker, it was always a dream of mine to write, direct and produce my own film and call my own shots. Well, I did it, and I'm glad.

Conflict runs through your work; you hit issues head on all the time and relish holding their little corpses up to show us. What was your one BIG target here, among all the little targets you’re hitting?
My big target in Wedding Night? It's just a big fuck you message to all these narrow-minded male chauvinists in our society. Misogynists, chauvinists, old-fashioned, sexist males and even sexist females, who believe that sex is a bad thing, these people who look down at women for even daring to speak out about sex and for having the courage to explore their sexualities. Sexual liberty is one of the most important rights for human beings, yet most people won't acknowledge that. "Wedding Night" is also a film that proudly shoves female aggression in your face. It's a film that says "hey, women have rights, too and we're not going to let you push us down."

It’s very slick, the trailer. How much did it cost and how did you raise it/convince people to take part in it?
The trailer didn't cost me any money. I just salvaged the film footage from the storage drive and then I created it on my laptop. But the real money will be pouring into post-production. It will cost me $4,000. Post Production includes: editing, colorization, sound synching, music, credits, and so on. When I first began to raise money for the film shoot, I used IndieGoGo and convinced a lot of people to donate to my film project. I raised over $1,000. I said that if you wanted to support a Deaf South Asian Muslim female filmmaker, this is your chance to help me. Hollywood is notoriously racist, sexist, and misogynistic. There are plenty of successful female filmmakers, yet they are ignored and shunned by the Hollywood studio system. Men are always favored over women. And then white men are always favored over non-white men and people of color. And then of course, most people cannot name a successful Deaf person working in Hollywood. So I said, if you're tired of the Hollywood studio system and you want to help someone make a film on her own, this is it. And that's how I got a lot of donations from the public.

Why would anyone in their right minds fund a revolutionary film-maker who’s made a habit of confronting taboos and prejudice so violently and graphically?
I have a little bit over $1,500 in donations for my Film Finishing Fund now, but I need more. If you can donate as little as $10 or $100, that would be great. If you're wondering why you should help me out, all I can say is this: if you go to the cinema and you complain about how mediocre, stupid and pathetic the female lead is, or if you read an article about Hollywood or Bollywood and you complain about the lack of successful female filmmakers being ignored, or if you complain about how film awards are always being handed out to men instead of women, then do something about it. Take out your wallet and give money to an aspiring female filmmaker. Encourage a Deaf person to become a filmmaker, artist, or writer and make their voices be heard. Encourage more filmmakers to make strong, interesting films about strong female leads instead of always creating bimbo, weak, pathetic female characters. Encourage young Muslims and South Asians to go out there and create a film, novel, play, or music that's not typical or cliched. Give me your money and I'll make more films with even better storylines that'll smash the mirror and shove it in people's faces.

The Internet has given you a voice and audience you otherwise wouldn't have, hasn't it?
I think in the Digital Age, in the age of youtube and Vimeo, in the age when crowd-sourced funding is becoming so common, we will face an even bigger change coming onto the filmmaking field. Today, you can create a webseries and put all the episodes online and people will watch. You can put your film online and people will watch. You can even get press attention from it, too. It's nice. More people are discovering that they don't need to get an agent or approach a film producer to get their scripts produced. You don't need to move to Los Angeles to be a filmmaker!! Who cares about Hollywood or Bollywood? Who cares about these irrelevant, pointless networking parties? You don't need an agent. You don't need famous friends. Write a script, set up an online fundraiser, ask people to donate money. I made a film on my own, and so can you. Hollywood is a place that needs to be destroyed. Hollywood keeps churning out pointless remakes and sequels. Hollywood keeps churning out the same, tired, sexist, racist, homophobic stereotypes. Hollywood is a white boys club where women and people of color are struggling to get into. Well, guess what? The studio system is rigid and it's time for Hollywood to collapse and crumble down.

Sabina's website is linked here or you can find her on Twitter: @jihadpunk77.

All Change For Authonomy

Image via Wikipedia
Warning - traffic destroying writing post follows...

One of the infamous, shadowy international writers group, the Grey Havens gang, alerted us to a blog post on Harper Collins' Authonomy site which heralds major changes to the site. The post recognises that Authonomy has major structural issues and appears to be a heads-up that changes will be made in the near future that will address these.

Authonomy is a peer-review site for writers to post samples of their work for others to read, criticise and, if they think it is of oustanding, publishable quality, to 'back' it. The most backed books each month are skimmed for a read by Harper Collins' editors. I have written much in the past about authonomy, if you're interested in all the background it's all collected at this here link. Probably the most controversial - and widely read and linked - post is this one, which led to this guest post on Eoin Purcell's blog, apparently so contentious that Eoin froze comments on it. I still think the post I did for Eoin best defines my view on authonomy at that time.

Just to be abundantly clear before I toss my hat once again into the ring of Authonomy debate - I am not sore that my book 'won' but didn't get published. I recognise, more now than ever before, that the book was funny and popular  but very, very badly written. I get that. However, I invested a lot of time, energy and thought into Authonomy and have gained much from my experiences with the site - both personally as a writer and professionally as someone who consults on communications - particularly in the digital/social space. (I have to add this caveat every time, depressingly, as the first response to anything I have to say about Authonomy is so frequently, 'that's just sour grapes cos you didn't get a contract', which isn't the case at all.)

At the time I left authonomy, I wrote:

We've never seen people - even the editors who review the books are anonymous. I'm sure HC thinks its being terribly funky and Web 2.0, but it's not. It's missed the first rule of these types of engagements with a community. Foster a community, be part of a community, engage with the community. HC hasn't, because it doesn't respect that community enough... Many people have had enough of being treated like the carvers in front of Gormenghast - even more so when it's become clear that the Groans don't want any of our carvings.

I liked the Gormenghast analogy so much I used it again in this post on the future of publishing, in which I pointed out that:

With all the energy of a group of kids in a huge playground, we invested a huge amount of time and effort on the site, vying to get to the top and using fair means and foul to do so. At the core of it, though, was a sincere belief in quality – the majority of users adhered to a principle that they’d only ‘back’ books that they would genuinely buy in a bookshop.

The changes that Harper Collins are making to authonomy will refocus the site, the company says, on that idea of rewarding quality rather than the messy cronyism, begging and whoring that has come to characterise the site. As Harper's blog post says:

In recent months, we'll admit that the site has been suffering from a kind of 'vote inflation' where support was given (or traded) very freely and as a result the rank of all books has been somewhat cheapened... We want the charts to mirror more accurately a community consensus, and for the feat of reaching an editor to be based on something other than months of superhuman networking effort. 

That's great, but I can only hope that my silly little voice (and others like me) got heard to some degree in the hallowed halls of Harper Collins: 


A site like that needs the active participation in the community of the organisation behind it. With sincerity that wins the trust of the community. You cannot run online communities, you have to be part of them. You have to accept the principle that you give up ownership in favour of participation. Putting up a patronising blog post every week or so from an editor, or the occasional forum intervention from an unnamed contributor in response to critical threads is not really what Web 2.0 is about, is it? Even the critiques on Authonomy are from unnamed editors. But then my argument is that it was never about critiques.

(that extract from my post on Eoin's blog)

Part of the problem has been, I am quite sure, 'old world thinking' - it's something we come across professionally pretty much every day these days - companies bring us in to consult on social media, digital and community programmes and want someone to provide the content and populate the profiles/communities for them because their own key staff are doing more important stuff, like talking to clients and partners - but the whole point about this stuff  is that it's not an ad campaign. You can't just book it and walk away from it, it's all about engagement and talking to people using new tools and a new degree of accessibility. Sure, it involves being exposed, taking some responsibility and actually engaging with customers and other stakeholders. But those concepts are core to this stuff, not peripheral. You need to be there yourself - just getting some developers or an agency to do it won't work. And running a community site with faceless camp guards policing it won't work either.

If the changes to Authonomy include Harper Collins' editors actually engaging in the site, being named members and helping authors, influencing debate, mentoring work they believe to be of merit, being kind to work that is fifth rate and telling authors, gently, that this is the case - wouldn't that be wonderful? If real world editors actually were part of the community, if books that rose to the top were taken, for instance, into a manuscript development program similar to the Hachette program that got my pal Phillipa Fioretti into print, wouldn't Authonomy very quickly become THE place for any aspiring author to go? Wouldn't it give Harper first dibs on pretty much every emerging talent in the world today?

Yes it would. 

The one thing Authonomy has ever lacked has been the active community participation of the people that created it. If that's about to change, it could be very big news indeed for publishing. And I would welcome it with open arms - it would become what I believed Authonomy was to start with - a vital, energising response from the publishing industry that embraced and leveraged the powerful democratisation of the Internet. 

How Social Media Taught Me How To Write

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I picked up a parcel from Sharjah post office yesterday containing a jar of homemade chutney. We had some with a slice of cheese on toast last night. It was delicious.

It had been sent to me by Australian author HélèneYoung after I came in as a runner up in a frivolous competition held in a guest post on on Hélène's blog by writer pal Phillipa Fioretti. (Did I mention that Phillipa's first book, 'The Book of Love' publishes on the 1st April? Yes? Oh, okay then) I confess I had not seriously expected to ever see a jar of home-made chutney arriving from 'down under', let alone one sent by a Bombardier pilot and novelist, but then that's the power of social media for you - the power to globalise chutney.

I met Phillipa on Harper Collins' authonomy, where I had put a lump of my first book with the hope of finding someone who'd want to publish it. One of the fascinating side effects of authonomy was to drive a huge focus on editing work, with writers encouraged to critique each others' work and sharing views, information and approaches to writing on the site's lively forums.
I started writing books because I had reasoned I could write well. I had written millions of words in a 22-year career in media and communications, from articles, news stories, interviews and reviews through to market research reports, speeches and white papers - I'd churned out all sorts of things for all sorts of people, from CEOs to Kings. Why not write a book?

I quickly learned that Space, my first book, was as funny as I thought it was. It was popular on authonomy and hit 'The Editor's Desk', voted there by the community of writers that made authonomy snap, crackle and pop. I also learned that it was very, very badly written - although I didn't know it at the time. I remember Jason Pettus of the Chigaco Centre for Literature and Photography being particularly horrified at the way Space was put together. It broke most of the 'rules' of bookish writing - to the point where I have now retired it as uneditable.

I had a second book up my sleeves, a serious book about Jordan called Olives, that I also put on authonomy - although this time around I was just after 'crits' for the work. The frenetic effort it took to get the first book to the top of the slush pile was exhausting - and the proffered 'crit' from a Harper Collins editor was hardly value that returned the effort. 

The crits on Olives started to make me think more deeply about how it was written and I started to make some big changes and a series of wide-ranging edits to the book. Phillipa worked with me on a big edit and made me go and buy some books on editing and writing (I had hitherto vehemently resisted doing that but Pip bullied me), and Heather Jacobs, another of the little band of writers I've stayed in almost daily touch with since authonomy, did a painstaking line edit of the book. Heather taught me I use 'that' too much, the latest in a series of lessons that has completely transformed the way I approach writing.

I haven't met a single person since I started all this. It's all been online. I have canvassed agents in the UK, had feedback on my work from hundreds of people from around the world and profited enormously from having broken my pre-authonomy 'I'm not telling anyone I write these things' approach and have made friends online with a number of smart, talented writers whose daily doses of input, support and general silliness have been invaluable. There are writers everywhere in my online life now - on Twitter, on Facebook and the blog, too. It's nice to have them there, because I know they understand.

If it hadn't been for authonomy, I'd have learned nothing. I probably would have given up and gone back to the day job. Now I'm on book number three and 'shopping' Olives in the meantime.
>
I wouldn't have got a jar of Australian chutney, either...

Sorry, folks, this week's mostly going to be about books (Which usually sends readership plummeting, but hey ho!) - you can blame the Emirates Airline International Literary  Festival - in particular, don't forget the social media and publishing session on Friday! There's a Twitvite and FaceBook event page, BTW.

A Very Literary Fellow

 

Well, I've been asked if I'd moderate the Social Media Session at the Emirates Festival of Literature next week and I obviously frowned, said I'd think it over and then screamed 'Yes!' one second later, clamped to their right arm like a strychnine-poisoned pitbull wired to the mains.

It's a public session and is open with no registration or ticket requirement and I think it's going to generate not only a great deal of interest but also a lively and interesting debate.

The permalink to the information page on the session is linked here. And you can follow the Festival's rather sound Twitter feed at @EmiratesLitFest.

Why so interested? Well, there is my genuine interest in the topic from a professional point of view for a start, I do, after all, work for an agency that's very wired up with all this social media stuff. But this one's personal, too. As many of you know I have a nasty book writing habit and I will gladly use and abuse any route that could get me near any of the very lovely and charming gatekeepers I can hornswoggle into giving some of my work their consideration. Added to that, having stayed in touch with a number of writer friends since the whole Harper Collins' authonomy thing (using, in many cases, social media!), this whole area has been one where we have enjoyed extensive debate - and which offers a future of opportunity and fear in seemingly equal measures.

I have been fascinated by the role of the Internet in authorship and publishing ever since that involvement with Authonomy. I believe that social media is inextricably tied in to the future of publishing and that innovations such as the iPad are game-changers that are inextricably tied into social media.

There are a number of opinions about the way that publishing is evolving. Some of the more aggressive proponents (Dan Holloway's views, linked here, are always fascinating) of social media see it as a platform that has the potential to disintermediate publishing houses and put control back into the hands of authors.

Publishing houses are trying to find ways to use social media and the Internet that compliment their more traditional marketing machines, one reason why we had authonomy at all, but they are becoming fearful (and rightly so) about where the control is going to reside in the new distribution models that are starting to look not only possible but likely.

Meanwhile, authors are finding that they are gaining more control from their use of social media - more connection to their audiences, more direct relationship with readers and a marketing powerhouse that's in their hands and not at the whim of the publisher's disinterested publicist. Golly, people are even using social media to open bookshops these days!

All of this and more is going to get poured into that session and I think we're going to have a real roller-coaster ride with it. Always so much more fun than a sedate stroll around the park, no?

Fire Petal Books - Making A Dream Come True

One of the many side-effects of doing the authonomy thing for me has been my membership of a shadowy cabal of revolutionary, anarchist and even occasionally just normal writers from around the world who have kept in touch over the past year and more, generally swapping edits, news, information, help and assistance and quite a lot of 'there there's too.

One of us, US based editor and writer of young adult books Michelle Witte, recently announced to the group that she was going to open a bookshop. She'd had something of a road to Damascus moment and decided that this was what she wanted to do more than anything else - a community bookshop aimed at young people in Utah, a space where reading and books, teaching and community mattered more than the chain-store big business shareholder-driven push for profit.

To my absolute delight, she didn't stop at announcing what she was up to. She set about making it happen with blinding speed. She set up a Kickstarter project, a Facebook page, a Twitter feed and a website, Fire Petal Books.Oh, and a YouTube channel as well!

And then she cast around for people to help with donating items for an auction to help her fund the startup costs - coming up with a list of authors, literary agents, editors and others that is pretty impressive to say the least, including Neil Gaiman, Chris Cleave and many others. Agents and editors, including two editors from Harper Collins have offered manuscript critiques and even a 15-minute phone call! 15 minutes on the phone to a Harper Collins editor is pretty stunning - especially given that HC will only look at agented authors, let alone talk to writers who aren't signed.

Now Michelle's auction is on - you can find details and bid on stuff here. You'll currently need more than $100 to bid for Neil Gaiman's signed copy of Beowulf, but don't let that stop you. She's got stories running on her in Publisher's Weekly and book trade e-publication Shelf Awareness and there's more to come.

I have the feeling that this is one lady whose dream is going to come true. It just goes to show, doesn't it? All you need is guts, determination and the new tools of the online world!

Books, Books, Books!

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

I have written about Dragon International Independent Arts before. Dragon was founded out of frustration at Harper Collins' authonomy, one of a number of initiatives to have been born out of the great coming together of writers that authonomy has caused. Strangely, I believe these grassroots movements of writers are doing more to define the future of publishing than companies like Harper Collins, still mired (as is much of the publishing industry) in offline thinking. And I am pleased to be able to tell you all that Dragon, for one, is doing very well indeed, thank you.

Founded by SarahJane Heckscher-Marquis, Dragon set out to establish a viable small independent publisher that would give people access to books of quality that had been overlooked by 'the machine', breaking down the barriers between readers and the books they want to read - as Dragon itself has it, 'Books for people who love books'. Sarah's brave move saw a number of the more interesting books on authonomy get put into print. Check them out:

Harbour
Paul House

Set in wartime Hong Kong under threat of Japanese invasion, this is a lush period piece and one of the many books on authonomy that I'd have bought if I had the chance. And now I do - you can buy the paperback here and the good news is that delivery to the UAE (or anywhere else in the world) is free!

1812
M.M. Bennetts

Now I'm going to come right out and say it: this isn't my kind of book. It's a huge historical novel set in the middle of the Napoleonic wars - but it's flawlessley written: I can remember one review on authonomy that made the point that there wasn't a single word out of place in the book and the Historical Novel Review called it 'compelling' and 'vivid'. If you 'do' historical novels, you can buy the paperback here.


Pistols for Two, Breakfast for One
Matthew Dick

Matthew Dick's a silly bugger and much of his silly buggeriness is evident in his excellent book. I remember first reading this book on authonomy and enjoying myself immensely. It's engaging, funny, swaggeringly well-written and redolent of the rather wonderful Terry Thomas school of absolute caddery as it follows the cowardly career of Hugo Hammersley, devious swine and serial womaniser. Buy it here.

Who must I kill to get published?
Jason Horger

There are 10,000-odd manuscripts languishing in the great online slushpile that is authonomy, so it's a dead cert that there are 10,000 people out there asking themselves this very question. A wannabe author finally finds an agent interested in his book only for the agent to turn up dead. Again, a book that was widely admired in its time on authonomy and a very popular one, too - perhaps because it's written with flair and a light, deft touch that is eminently readable. It's also funny and buyable here.

These first four Dragon titles were released in November and are available to bookshops throughout the UK thanks to a distribution deal that Dragon has done with Central Books - and, of course, globally online as the links above prove - don't forget that free delivery now!

Kindle versions will be available from April, too.

Now there's news that Dragon is to publish a further two titles - Heikki Hietala's Tulagi Hotel and Greta van de Rol's Die a Dry Death. Again, both books were popular reads on authonomy.

In fact, SJ has done a neat job of cherry-picking some of the better books from the authonoslush, books that bobbed at the top of the 10,000-odd hopefuls and that stood out because they had that 'something' that makes you want to read the damn thing.

I had originally seen authonomy as a fascinating exercise in democratising publishing through the crowdsourcing that many companies are now finding is an important asset - listening to customers in order to define products and services that better suit their requirements. It's a great use for social media, for instance.

Fed up with being offered discounted copies of Katie Price's ghost-written pap and worse, I had thought the idea of actually selecting books through a filter of peer-review could shake things up a little. That wasn't authonomy's aim, as it turned out, but it is Dragon's and the fact that the company has not only survived but is expanding its list (they're also getting involved in non-fiction and possibly even film) to other media is something I am following with great interest and a raa raa for the li'l guy.


 

Strange Searches

Image via Wikipedia

I like to take an occasional look at how people get here to this dusty little corner of the Internet – the results are almost always rewarding in some strange way. There are a number of perennial favourites - I still ‘own’ the immortal nmkl pjkl ftmch and this picture of a plastic chicken is still highly popular – as well as some new delights. And people searching for words like mafsoum, akid and mafi still land here, which is a giggle!



Souks
Keeping this blog going for years has finally paid off. If you Google souks, this moany little collection of near-daily offcuts is number seven search result in the world out of something a little over 400,000 results. Tada! I am now a recognised and leading authority on souks! I shall have a sheriff badge made.

Cow Aorta
If you’re looking for cow aortas, believe it or not, this is the world's number one place to find them thanks to the RTA’s slightly strange looking sustainability campaign trophy thingy.After that, you get about 98,000 scientific journals and things talking about real cow aortas.

Klazart Authonomy
It is amazing to me that anyone’s still interested in this! Gamer Vineet Balla, AKA Klazart, ‘gamed’ the Harper Collins authonomy website in early 2009 by inviting a horde of gamer buddies to vote his book to the top. This resulted in a great deal of authorial brouhaha at the time, but oddly someone, somewhere, is still interested in the incident. Someone also found this here fusty wee blog by searching ‘how to move to rank 1 on authonomy’. I wouldn’t bother, mate.


Someone else also found da blog by Googling 'Eva Bartholdy' which pulled me up short - she's  a character from my first book, spoof international thriller Space (which, incidentally, made it to the authonomy editor's desk and was part of the proof that the editor's desk thingy wasn't really worth it in the first place).

Womin fack animal
Somewhere in the world, a drooling pervert with acute dyslexia got this instead of what he was looking for. And I am glad.

fake indian driving license in Australia
Don't ask me. It lands on this.  I get a lot of fakes - fake cheque books, fake plastic coconuts, fake driving tests, fake numerologists, fake plastic tokens, fake soybean plants, fake windscreen cracks, fake Hiltis and fake camels. Fake camels really does boggle the mind...

people you know and trust are somewhat fake?
Part of the Great Fake Series, this one had a slightly sad and betrayed air to it. Luckily it lands on advice from me of no value whatsoever.


us food is crap
Number three search result in all the multiverse! I'm quite proud of that.  I'm equally proud that hundreds (if not thousands by now) have searched for the ingredients of, or directly for, Pringles and Aquafina - and got to my posts outlining quite how both of these mildly egregious products are manufactured.

Sexy Tweets
Okay, I wrote a post about how to Tweet Sexy.  I wonder if the Googler in question got what he/she really wanted?


nimble 80286
If you persist to the second page of search results you get this, but why anybody would want to search for a diet bread and a processor beats me.

Phillipa Fioretti
Through no fault of her own, people are starting to search for my writer friend Pip and landing here. This won't last as she is soon to be playing in much more stellar company - her first novel, The Book of Love, goes on sale in Australia on April 1 and, of course, I am hoping that it is going to sell like billy-o, thereby relegating her fleeting involvement in this shameful little blog to the millionth page of search results after all those glowing reviews by otherwise hard-bitten critics.

eeste
God alone knows what it is and in which esoteric language, but searching for 'eeste' gets you this post on ve middul eeste pee aar awordes, the title inspired of course by one Nigel Molesworth. Maybe it's the brilliant new name for Vegemite after they dumped iSnack 2.0...

To all of you who have been deceived into coming here because of the strangeness of SEO, I am sorry but there is nothing of much use to anyone here. To those of you that keep coming by for some mad reason of your own, thank you for your visit. Don't forget to wash the handbasin on your way out for the convenience of other guests.

The Unbearable Inevitability of Disruption

Image via Wikipedia

I started today off taking part in the Dubai Eye Radio Apple iPadFest. The launch last night has meant that iPad has trended Google consistently for the past 24 hours, beating Obama’s State of the Nation address into as low as 6th place. The buzz on Twitter, blogs, radio stations and TV has been phenomenal – and it was nice to see Sky News cut live to the announcement and then lose the link, totally flubbing the story and cutting to Milliband and Clinton droning on sanctimoniously about Yemen instead.

Given, then, that it’s international iPad day today, I thought I’d expand a bit on something I said yesterday. Granted, it’s an element of the McNabb catechism, but I think it’s core to the million dollar question for people who write books – will people use this thing rather than a book? Could I see myself doing that?

The catechism bit is this: “Quality becomes irrelevant when technology enables access.” This has been the case consistently over the ages. The first example that I can think of is the invention of the printing press. The movement of knowledge around Europe in the Dark Ages was laboriously slow, illuminated manuscripts painstakingly copied by monks in scriptoria and jealously guarded from those ‘unfit’ to have access to such a trove. These books were beautiful, true labours of love that were illustrated in amazing detail, both as illustration of the text as well as illustration to give form to concepts and ideas contained in the content.

The Book of Kells

Then William Caxton pitches up without so much as a by your leave and invents the printing press. Suddenly anyone could make multiple copies of books, let alone posters and leaflets. The significance of the invention for governments, let alone the Catholic Church, was tremendous. The quality of the print was lousy by comparison, but that didn’t matter. Technology had improved access.

An early Caxton print
 

Each major leap forward in technology since has had a similar effect, the telegraph, the telephone, wireless and so on. Each time technology improved access, quality didn’t matter. Would I prefer a lovingly written letter on fine vellum telling me that my daughter has had a healthy 8lb baby three months after the fact? Or a terse telegram printed out on strips of paper in block capitals?

There’s another example from an earlier post here, but my favourite comes from last time Apple pulled a stunt like this. I, like many other people, bought a CD player and started buying CDs instead of vinyl. The quality was so much better, banks of 16-bit analogue to digital converters straining away to sample sound at a staggering 44 MHz to give a 22 MHz playback – higher than the human ear can hear (the 44/22 relationships is thanks to the Nyquist criterion. You don’t want to know about that, trust me). I bought the ‘you can hear the conductor put down his baton’ sales line and our house filled with racks of CDs, the cassettes and vinyl getting dusty in the attic.

Now I’ve ripped all my CDs and play them on our iPods. The process of ‘ripping’, compressing a CD track to an MP3, causes a reduction in quality. Worse, I listen to most of my music when I’m driving – using a little radio thingy that plugs into the cigarette lighter. So my reduced quality sample (reduced high end as well as dynamic range) is now played over a radio link (further reducing both) to give me an audio experience that is worse than chrome cassette.

Do I care? I do not. I have access to all my music in one handy player (well, three, if I’m honest).

The qualitative argument made by publishers is of the quality of writing. Quality is a funny word (it is impossible to define, according to the key character in Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance), we have quality of product, quality of mercy and a million other qualities. The key to the ‘will people adopt e-reading’ debate is not quality of writing – it’s the quality of experience. We see reading as essentially tactile , you know, ‘I like to curl up a warm sofa with a good book’ but that’s just force of habit. We used to see music in the same sort of way, we were attached to good old vinyl and didn’t like those cold little silvery platey things.

Believe me, reading a book on a computer screen is a real bitch (anyone who’s been through the authonomy mill knows that all too well). But we already read more on screens than we do on paper each day. And we write books on screens, too.

The convenience of an e-reader that is readable, that turns pages fast and that gives us access to books, newspapers and anything that the Internet can chuck at us is, I believe, just about enough to start the ball rolling. I’m not saying we’re all going to be using readers by the end of the year, but I believe that tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of people will.

This will have any number of effects. One will be that there will be more authors able to reach wider audiences. Another will be that people will have access to a wider choice of reading material from more ‘voices’ than ever before. Another will be that authors will make less money on average, although have the potential to make more money than before. And another will be, as I said yesterday, that publishing will be changed forever. Quality, as the publishing industry has it, will suffer to a certain degree as everyone who thinks they can write a book shares their awful scribbling (I blush when I read my first book, Space, now. It got the old authonomy gold star and it is very funny but it’s an awful mess of a thing). But that’ll even out as imprints emerge that build reputations around offering new, good quality writing.

We called the iPad disruptive on the radio this morning. And disruptive it most certainly is. Sure, the Kindle was first. But the iPad looks slicker, a great deal more usable and with an iTunes-like back end it's likely going to set the market afire.

Whereto Publishing?

Image via Wikipedia

"If you can see into the future, you're not looking ahead far enough," said the bloke that put the hole in the toilet seat that is the Internet, Tim Berners-Lee. Right now, that is particularly true in the world of publishing, where a great looming cloudy thing is gathering on the horizon.

Problem is, nobody knows quite what's in it.

I have long been fascinated with the question of where publishing's going. This is because I used to be in the publishing industry (before I fell into PR, insensibly, like a boiled frog) and also because I have a nasty book-writing habit. Harper Collins' experiment in online talent-spotting and stealth POD site, Authonomy, showed how book publishers were casting around for some way to use the Internet in their business models. At the same time, magazine and newspaper publishers have been watching revenues dwindle as all those bloodshot morning coffee eyeballs drifted onto the Internet.

The problem facing both categories of publisher is that they are wedded tightly to their business model - and it's a business model whose very existence is based on inefficiency. It's simply got to go.

This is not something I say because I want it to go. While I have long suffered from the whole 'carvers at the gates of Gormenghast' aspect of submitting to publishers, I am deeply attached to the papery wonderfulness that is a good book. It's just that it doesn't really work very well anymore.

Authors are paid a percentage of the cover price of a book. Publishers print lots of books, essentially speculatively, and depend on trying to sell a high percentage of the total number of books. They will never, ever sell all of the books. If you're doing very, very well you might sell 60%. The rest are returns and so the cost of any given book is actually a tad over 140% of its actual cost of production, print, shipping and so on. This is the first inefficiency - wastage on returns.

The total cost of the book will include something like 40% for the distributor (20% for the disty and 20% for the retailer). The author will make something around 8-10% of sales, although the percentage depends on who that author is.

Given that I can put a book in your hands for nothing using the Internet, the process of chopping down trees and squeezing them through printing presses, shipping them all over the world and then accepting the unsolds getting shipped back again (to be remaindered and then, if all hope is lost, pulped) seems to be terribly inefficient. And it is.

I have often said that the last refuge of the about-to-be-disintermediated is 'quality'. Never has it been so true of publishing the traditional way. You need professional editors to give a book quality. You can't replace the quality of a paper book. You'll lose all quality if you open up the publishing market to any Tom, Dick and Harry who thinks they can write a book.

In the time I was involved with Authonomy, you'd often hear me saying that I had found more books on the website that I wanted to read than I had found in my local bookshops. That was, and is, the case. There's a lot of great writing out there that could not be published not because it wasn't good or highly readable, but because it didn't fit into the commercial needs of a market that was based on focusing solely on the 'next big thing' precisely because of its inherent inefficiencies.

I have posted before about some interesting efforts to redefine book publishing that were born out of authonomy - and I think that life is about to get even more interesting for these fledgling attempts to find an alternative to the traditional publishing model.

At the same time, magazine and newspaper publishing (with many of the same inherent inefficiencies of sales and returns and the like) are both seeing declining sales and advertising revenue (see this guest post from writer pal and newspaper editor Robb Grindstaff). Early attempts to apply 'old fashioned' thinking to the Internet have racked up failure after failure - we ain't going to pay you for content we can get for free. This total disaster is the latest warning that newspaper 'paywalls' aren't the solution.

If Apple's announcement today is what I think it is going to be, a smart, usable tablet 'multi-reader' supported by a user-friendly transactional portal, then we will see if the soundbite of the year will come true: "Apple is going to do for publishing what the iPod did for the music industry."

Authors in the UK can make 75% of an e-book sale, which is not only fairer on the content creator, it reflects the fact that the actual cost of distribution of an e-book is zilch, nada and mafie. Editing and marketing are a cost - and an imprint will still want to gatekeep to keep quality high. But selling fewer books could make an author just as much money - and so smaller , more defined audiences can be served with more of what they want.

This doesn't mean the end for books and newspapers, by the way. It doesn't mean the end of journalism and authorship. It just means the end of publishing houses stuffed with gatekeepers, yoyo-toting cretins and marketing departments that want to sign up any half-celebrity or vampire novel rather than actually finding out what readers want. There'll be new publishers - quality imprints that are slicker, world-sourced and more nimble, marketing-centric and reader-driven, participative and community-minded.

And they'll be efficient.

Gormenghast and the Future of Publishing

Image via Wikipedia

Longer-suffering readers of this silly little blog will know about Harper Collins’ authonomy website and my opinion of it. For those that weren’t around, this post pretty much explains things. The post was something of a bombshell in its time, BTW.

Authonomy was Harper Collins’ attempt to harness the process of change that the Internet is undoubtedly going to bring to publishing in a similar fashion to the change it is bringing the music industry. Although the company scrupulously avoided outlining any strategy, it is my opinion that the overall gameplan was to create a website that would attract authors and encourage them to put their books online (Authonomy), a website for readers (Book Army) and then allow the authors to ‘self publish’ for the readers by using a POD (print on demand) supplier. Today’s POD systems can create high quality single books at near-market prices.

The Authonomy deal was this: if you made it to the top five books each month on Authonomy, a Harper Collins editor would read and critique your manuscript, or MS. Getting an MS in front of a Harper Collins editor is a bit like getting ten minutes with Warren Buffet to chat about your new business proposal – and just as difficult. So it’s no wonder that the site soon attracted something in the region of 6,000 writers. You’d be surprised how many carvers there are living around Castle Gormenghast.

My ‘generation’ on Authonomy (before anyone starts squealing ‘sour grapes’, I made it to the top five and got a ‘gold star’ as well as a crit from an HC editor. You’ll have to read the ‘backstory’ linked above to see what I thought of it) was pretty much the first ‘wave’ of writers to discover the site and consisted of a heck of a lot of really talented people. With all the energy of a group of kids in a huge playground, we invested a huge amount of time and effort on the site, vying to get to the top and using fair means and foul to do so. At the core of it, though, was a sincere belief in quality – the majority of users adhered to a principle that they’d only ‘back’ books that they would genuinely buy in a bookshop. Although there was a huge element of popularity and ‘plugging’ of books, we reasoned that if you could market yourself on Authonomy, it just proved you could market yourself in the real world too, so was fair game as part of the mix that makes a book.

It looked very much as if HC had created a site that was intended to do what the Internet does best – improve access and disintermediate the gatekeepers, in this case the agenting system that means that only books with obvious mass market commercial potential get through to publishers. Now it looked as if readers could actually vote for the type of book they’d like to see in bookshops – and if HC was to add authonomy winners to its lists, there’d be a new and wonderful outbreak of crowdsourced work to choose from. I can honestly say, BTW, that I read more work that I would buy on Authonomy than I have seen in bookshops all year. Really.

Of course, it was not to be. The POD plan lurked and I ‘outed’ HC when they sent a private email to some of us offering us beta list status. I accused the company of being insincere, in offering a clear ‘get published’ carrot when in fact it only ever intended to create a POD site to hedge against the tide of innovation. It is still my humble opinion that this was the case.

But something else has happened as a result of authonomy, something rather wonderful. In fact several things.

One thing is that I have stayed in touch with a relatively close-knit group of writers I admire and respect, and we’re just as much in touch a year after we all wandered away from Authonomy muttering darkly (A huge number of people have left the site, disaffected with the whole game and the way HC has chosen to play it).

A much more important thing is that the disaffection and annoyance at the ‘traditional’ publishing industry and the way it treats writers has resulted in two groups of writers from authonomy creating real, truly important (IMHO) initiatives that I believe are much more about the true future of publishing than Authonomy.

Year Zero Writers

Dan Holloway is a lecturer by day and maverick by night. Actually, he’s probably pretty maverick by day, too, but we’ll give him the benefit of the doubt.

The author of the evocative and hauntingly beautiful Songs From the Other Side of the Wall, Dan founded the Year Zero Writers group as a collective designed to pool resources and talent in a way that would enable writers to reach out to audiences with their books. You can find out more about Year Zero here. Dan’s Year Zero projects include Free-e-day (see the BookBuzzr link below) and (to my knowledge) the first ‘FaceBook book’ (The Man Who Stole Agnieszka’s Shoes was written in weekly instalments on a FaceBook group, taking the input of readers to mould the plot). has seen Year Zero growing in popularity, attracting readers and participants and spawning a vibrant writers’ blog that is attracting readers in a most satisfactory manner.

Four books have been ‘published’ by Year Zero and more are planned - one compilation of short stories (Brief Objects of Beauty and Despair) and three novels. You can go to the Year Zero site, interact with the authors, find out more about their work (it is excellent) and then either download a PDF (free - in other formats here) or order a printed copy (paid for) of those books (the links are to Dan's 'Songs'). Although not the most active member of Year Zero, I am deeply proud to be associated with it.

Dragon International Independent Arts

Diiarts is a small independent imprint founded by writer Sarah Jane Heckscher-Marquis, which on November 14th will ‘conventionally’ publish four books that were hugely popular on authonomy and that represent, along with the three books that Year Zero has announced, some of the first books to have been published as a result of the authonomy project.
SJ has taken the highly unusual step of getting so frustrated at seeing great fiction (and I would personally, having read large amounts of all of them, commend them most highly to you, particularly Paul House’s stunning work, Harbour) mouldering on the slushpile and being overlooked by the Groans that she has put up her own money to publish some of her favourite work from the site. With the avowed intent of creating and maintaining her own small list of high quality fiction, she has had the pick of the best stuff on authonomy and has, I believe, chosen wisely.

As SJ says in the diiarts.com launch press release, “We believe there is a great deal of high quality, distinctive writing out there, which the larger publishers are just not picking up. Not only are readers missing out, but we’re losing something of the richness and diversity of the English language. We’re in danger of losing the spirit of innovation and thoughtfulness that’s been the hallmark of the English novel since we invented it. What we’ve seen is that more and more authors are expected to compromise on their vision, their voice and their artistic values, to cut their work down at whatever cost to fit supermarket display racks. We believe—passionately—that our authors should be in control of their own work. When they are, great books are the result.”

What has me chuckling evilly is the fact that both of these initiatives came about as a result of Authonomy. And, of course, I believe they both represent different facets of the change that will eventually lead to the flooding of Gormenghast - 'e-books' and small, independent publishers who are passionate about books, not shareholders, together will forge what I believe to be the future of publishing.